Influence Of Separation Experience On Self-concept

"Know yourself was written on the post of the gate of the Temple of Apollo, in Greece. Human being never stop exploring the concept of self. In recent psychological researches, psychologists have separately explored the influence of culture and motivation on self-concept. The present study aimed at examining the influence of separation experience by taking left-behind middle school students and undergraduates with left-behind experience (ULB) as object.Three studies were conducted in this paper. The changing of closeness toward caregiver was regarded as an external indicator. In order to explore the influence of separation experience, self-reference paradigm was applied in study1and study2. In study1, left-behind middle school students were recruited and were asked to do an adjective judgment task. There were four kind of encoding conditions, self-revetment, mother-relevant, caregiver-/grandmother-relevant and semantic condition. In an unexpected recall task, participants were asked to recall as many as words which were showed in the study and wrote them down. Comparing with students without left-behind experience, students with left-behind experience showed higher closeness with caregiver, and they not only recalled more words related with self and mother, but also recalled more words related with caregiver. In respect to students with left-behind experience, the information related to caregiver encoding condition was received better processing. This showed as an strengthened memory effect. In study2, by comparing the performance of undergraduates with or without left-behind experience in the four encoding conditions, caregiver reference effect was testified again. The influence of separation experience on self-concept was last until adult.Based on the findings of study1and study2, the third study was conducted to explore the influence of separation experience on processing information related to caregiver. We adopted a three-stimulus oddball paradigm. The big circle was regarded as the standard stimuli, the small circle was regarded as the object stimuli, the three type of name stimulus (self, mother, caregiver/grandmother, Luxun) was regarded as distractive stimuli. The results were that: self-arid mother-relevant stimuli elicited a larger P300amplitudes than by Luxun-relevant stimuli does and P300elicited by grandmother-relevant stimuli was not different with those elicited by Luxun-relevant stimuli for non-ULB. However, when it come to ULB, although there is not different P300amplitude elicited by caregiver-and luxun-relevant stimuli, the P300amplitude was enhanced by caregiver-relevant stimuli. What’s more, there is significant P300amplitude elicited by self-and caregiver-relevant stimuli at FC1and FC5.According to the findings of three studies, we can conclude that (1) separation experience not only influence the closeness between students with left-behind experience, but also influence their self-concept. It is easy for LBC and ULB to process information related to caregiver;(2) The influence had a long term effect, it would last in adult;(3) although they had separation experience with their mother, three is still a mother-reference effect in processing information related to mother for LBC and ULB. This may be explained by the culture.